5 years later

For obvious reasons, the anniversary of Sept 11 is more than uncomfortable for me.
In years past I've been in New York -- both on the actual day as well as the subsequent anniversaries. I always treated it as a day to just let any feelings come up that I may have been supressing for the other 364 days of the year. It was a day I allowed myself to feel and deal with any pain or emotions that, in the desire to keep moving forward, I push aside whenever they normlly rear their ugly heads.
Sometimes this idea works, other times it doesn't. Sometimes it's a day of introspection and reflection, other times it's a day spent waiting for something in me to happen; only to find, daysweeksmonths later that what I had planned for that day instead chose to arrive at inconvenient moments. These moments are mostly inconvenient because there is no way to explain them. You just feel out of control.
Being on the other side of the world, literally, during this time is bittersweet. Yes, I feel safer here than I did when I was in NYC. No, the threat of terrorism is not a palpable fear that people here live with on a daily basis. For that I am really grateful, and was one of the main elling points for living in NZ.
At the same time, on this one day of the year that I allow myself to grieve, mostly I just feel distance. While sympathetic to the experience, the distance between NZ and NY prevents people here from really understanding what it all means to me. I feel the need to explain why I feel the way I do, lest people think I'm being "difficult". How can they possibly understand what it was and continues to be like? I don't expect them to. But it's also hard when there's not that same room to feel as there is in NY.

The distance also means that the anniversary is a two-day experience. There's Sept 11th here, which I want to mark, but that's still Sept 10th there. Then on Sept 12th here, the rest of the world (at least on the Northern Hemisphere) marks the day, even though that moment has already passed here.
See what I mean?

I'll get through this, which has become an all too familiar mantra for me in the past few weeks, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that for me each anniversary is as unique and challenging as the day itself was. Not to the same degree, obviously, but the challenge and struggle doesn't go away.